Live Your Extraordinary Life With Michelle Rios

Energy Healing Essentials with Siri Baruc Thornton

• Michelle Rios

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What if the key to living your extraordinary life isn't found in doing more, but in remembering who you truly are? In this illuminating conversation, I'm joined by energy healer Siri Baruc Thornton, founder of Sage & Blush with over 26 years of experience in transformative modalities.

Siri gently demystifies three powerful healing practices that can help even the most logical, high-achieving leaders reconnect with their authentic selves. We explore Reiki as universal life force energy that creates homeostasis in your body, breathwork as a pathway to release what's stored in your tissues, and Akashic Record readings as "spiritual therapy" offering soul-level perspective on your deepest questions.

What makes this conversation particularly compelling is our shared experience at a recent retreat where I witnessed firsthand how these practices created profound shifts for a group of accomplished entrepreneurs. Siri beautifully articulates why it's so challenging for high performers to fully feel—explaining how our survival brain prioritizes safety over expansion, and why creating new neural pathways requires courage but leads to liberation.

For skeptics, Siri offers reassurance that these practices don't require belief to be effective—just curiosity and openness. "You don't have to believe in Reiki to feel the benefits," she explains, comparing it to trying a new food. The discussion reveals how these modalities provide safe opportunities to move beyond living on autopilot into full embodiment and self-expression.

Whether you're navigating leadership challenges, building a business, or simply seeking more meaning in your everyday experience, this conversation offers practical wisdom about accessing your intuition and expanding your capacity to feel good—in all its messy, beautiful complexity. As Siri puts it, "We are not here just to survive. We are here to thrive."

Ready to explore energy healing for yourself? Listen now and discover how these practices might be the missing piece in your journey toward living fully expressed and aligned with your authentic power.

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Speaker 1:

This episode of the Live your Extraordinary Life podcast is brought to you by Transformational Coaching with Michelle Rios. Created for high achievers just like you who've checked all the boxes yet still wonder is this really it? You've built success, but deep down, you're craving more, more meaning, more freedom, more joy. You're ready for your next chapter, one that feels fully aligned, deeply fulfilling and unapologetically yours? Through my transformational coaching, I'll help you break free from the patterns and beliefs keeping you stuck, clarify your vision for life and business in this next chapter of life, build unshakable confidence and self-trust, align your mindset, energy and actions so success feels authentic and easeful, and create extraordinary results without sacrificing yourself along the way. If you're done playing small and you're ready to rise, visit michelleriosofficialcom. Backslash coaching to learn more and apply. Your extraordinary life is waiting. Are you ready?

Speaker 2:

So the type of breathwork that I do is just a triactive breath. I don't actually do lots of different variations of breathwork. I've tried various types of breathwork and I've landed on this triactive breath, which I find to be the most powerful and the most beautiful and the most exciting and cathartic and the most healing, and I just feel my most expansive, most expressed self, my most relaxed, dropped in authentic self.

Speaker 3:

Hi, I'm Michelle Rios, host of the Live your Extraordinary Life podcast. This podcast is built on the premise that life is meant to be joyful, but far too often we settle for less. So if you've ever thought that something is missing from your life, that you were meant for more, or you simply want to experience more joy in the everyday, then this podcast is for you. Each week, I'll bring you captivating personal stories, transformative life lessons and juicy conversations on living life to the fullest, with the hope to inspire you to create a life you love on your terms, with authenticity, purpose and connection. Together, we'll explore what it means to live an extraordinary life, the things that hold us back and the steps we all can take to start living our best lives. So come along for the journey. It's never too late to get started, and the world needs your light.

Speaker 4:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Live your Extraordinary Life podcast. I'm your host, Michelle Rios, and today's episode we are featuring a guest who, first of all, I've known for some time now and I really love her to pieces, so I'm excited for you to get to know her. But she is the founder of Sage Blush. She has over 26 years of experience in energy healing. So we're going to talk about Reiki, Akashic Record Reading and Transformational Breathwork, which I know is going to be new for a lot of you listening in. So we're going to delve deep into that and help you understand how these different modalities can help you, the busy leader and entrepreneur, really return back to yourself, which is the whole goal. We talk about that a lot here on the show, and I want us to be able to really delve into Siri's expertise in a way that perhaps you haven't been exposed to before. So, without further ado, my dear friend, Siri Baruch-Thornton is here today. Welcome to the show, Siri. How are you doing?

Speaker 2:

Thank you, michelle. I am doing so well because I've been so looking forward to talking with you on your podcast, which I've listened to several times and very much enjoyed. So thank you, it's such an honor.

Speaker 4:

You know and likewise I should have mentioned Siri not only is an energy healer and she hosts some of the most fabulous retreats, of which I have participated in, so we'll talk more about that in a bit but she also is the host of an incredible podcast, herself the Authentic Creative. I've been on the show before. It's a wonderful place for conversation. She's coming on again, yes, and what I love about what Siri's doing on the show is it's really about powerful conversations that center on everything from self-expression to really spiritual growth and renewal and embodiment, which not a lot of people focus on, and the secret sauce to so much of what we're trying to create in our life is around embodiment. So we'll talk more about what that means, but I want to dive right in Siri and hit it hard here. All right, let's talk about Reiki. What is it and how do you explain it to someone who thinks maybe it's a little woo from what?

Speaker 2:

they know Sure, yeah Well, first of all I want to validate if you think it's Wu or if you don't know what. It is Perfectly normal. I did not understand what Reiki was when I first discovered it too. We have different exposures to it. Nowadays, reiki is quite popular in the spiritual world. You can find it at your local spa a lot of the time. A lot of times, if you get a massage, you won't necessarily know it, but a lot of masseuses are attuned to the Reiki vibration. And so what you're feeling sometimes when you get a massage and you feel that extra deeper warmth, that extra tingling, that extra. You can't quite explain what it is, but it just feels like extra love. That is because they are attuned to Reiki. And what is Reiki? So Reiki means universal life force energy, aka the energy of unconditional love unconditional love.

Speaker 2:

And the first time I ever experienced Reiki was when I was a teenager. My mom was suffering from migraine headaches, debilitating migraine headaches. She was in bed a lot of my childhood and she found Reiki After really searching in the western medical field for solutions. Reiki became a major solution for her, and so I reluctantly received reiki at first because I was a teenager and I was like, mom, what are you doing? What is this?

Speaker 2:

But myself recognized the energy and felt that sense of safety and opened up and drew in the energy, which is what happens. And when you draw that energy in, it's the most loving, warm, safe feeling. You know the feeling, michelle, when you have the best hug ever. That is Reiki. Right, that is the pure energy, the life force energy, the energy of unconditional love. There's a reason why when we receive a hug for more than 26 seconds, we are regulated in our nervous system. Our culture is a touch-starved culture, so Reiki is a way to have safe touch with integrity, with permission, we are able to give and receive this unconditional love, life force, energy. Everything that is alive has an energy field, has a force field, and if you've ever seen Star Wars, you know there is a force field, there's a force, there's energy, it's all energy. And now science is catching up to this, that we know, now that everything is vibration, everything is energy.

Speaker 4:

Everything is energy and we talk a lot about that on this show. So the listeners know we talk about everything is energy. You are energy, we are all energetic beings and it's really about tuning into a certain frequency and vibration that really determines your experience as you walk through life. So help us understand the relationship between us as energetic beings and Reiki as a life force. Do we contain Reiki within us? Is it something that we draw in from outside of us or is it something we give from within? Talk a little bit more about what that relationship between us and Reiki really is.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, all of the above. So we are Reiki because we are life force, energy, we are love. That's what we're made up of, that's who we truly are, at the core. And also, sometimes we can feel out of balance. Dis-ease is the word dis and ease. So if we're out of balance, we can create disease in the body.

Speaker 2:

And what Reiki does is it brings us into a state of homeostasis, so it helps the body to communicate better with itself. So optimal is this homeostasis. Once our energy is in this alignment, in this homeostasis, then our body can do everything that it needs to do. It knows exactly how to heal itself. It has the intelligence. So the Reiki is this precise energy that helps the communication within the body, within the energy field of the body. So, really, what we're doing, for example, is plugging in right, and we can plug in energetically in various ways, and Reiki is one way of plugging in.

Speaker 2:

So what's beautiful about Reiki is what we learn in first degree Reiki. If you take a first degree Reiki certification from a Reiki master like myself, the first thing you learn is self-healing. Like we cannot pour, as you well know on this podcast. We cannot pour from an empty cup podcast. We cannot pour from an empty cup. So self Reiki is the basis and the foundation of Reiki is and and there's a misconception.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes people think, because you can do Reiki long distance, that that's all that Reiki is. It's just this like non-touch healing, and that's, I think, the little bit of the woo conception of it. But actually one of the most powerful aspects of Reiki is the hands-on healing aspect. So one of my teachers was my mom and her teachers, but then my other teacher was this woman, libby Barnett, and Libby Barnett wrote a book called Reiki, energy Medicine and her whole mission, which is why I was attracted to her as my teacher. I read like 30 books and I was like this one and I recommend that for everyone to like really be discerning about your teacher. Libby Barnett is all about bringing Reiki into hospitals, hospice and home. So, to answer your question and come back to it is, it is who we are, it's also what we can plug into and it's also what we can receive from others. So we can, we can be it, we can have it, we can receive it, just like with energy, just like with love.

Speaker 4:

So when we talk about dropping down into our heart space yeah, sort of operating from our head space, I'm assuming, so correct me if I'm wrong that is the place that we access energy. When we are operating from that deeper space, we call the higher self, or you know, that deep, knowing, intuitive place from within, versus when we're speaking from ego or logic or the analytical mind, which I think is important to point out. A lot of the people that are listening here are in busy businesses, corporations, they're leaders, they're entrepreneurs, and there is part of them that has been taught and needs to operate from a logical headspace. But when we're talking about the power of Reiki, it's coming from that other space, is it not?

Speaker 2:

That's a really interesting discernment and a really interesting question, and I haven't actually looked at that question so much before, michelle, and what I will say is Reiki is definitely a space, as I keep saying, of unconditional love and of course, we associate the space of unconditional love with the heart. When you're accessing Reiki as a practitioner either first or second degree, or when you're being the practitioner, you're actually accessing that life force energy from source the practitioner you're actually accessing that life force energy from source. So actually the way and this is what's so beautiful is you simultaneously receive it while you're giving it, so you are sourced while you're sourcing. This can be something that you do before you enter a room for a meeting. This can be something you do on yourself before you go on to a podcast or give a presentation. This can be something you do for yourself before you go on to a podcast or give a presentation. This can be something you do for yourself at night, if you're having trouble falling asleep, or you wake up in the night and you can give yourself Reiki.

Speaker 2:

The way that it works is that through your prayer, that you learn, through your intention that does come from your heart space, and through these symbols and mantras that you learn in second degree Reiki, you're able to access this universal life force, energy from source, which really is like above your head. Let's just say it comes down your crown, down your third eye center, your energy center, down your throat energy center, your throat chakra, into your heart center. It's the yes. And then from that heart center down the energy center, your throat chakra, into your heart center. It's the yes. And then from that heart center down the extension of your heart, out your arms into your hands, and then the hands become the delivering access point, so the hands then become this extension of the heart space. So yes, and also there's, there's more of it coming from source. So what I think is so incredible is, if you are a high achiever, you don't have to give from a place of just you, of a place where you're feeling burnt out or depleted. You can be giving from a place of feeling and being literally sourced by source energy, sourced by universal life energy. So, plugging in, the first thing we learn in first degree Reiki and any of the modalities that I do is how to ground and run your energy.

Speaker 2:

My stepdad was a lawyer and my mom and my stepdad opened a center where they taught a lot of these spiritual tools, reiki, psychic things and it was right next to my dad's law office, so he had people that were lawyers that would come and learn about all these spiritual practices and it very much heightens your intuition, it very much heightens your gut instinct and what you learn when you're learning Reiki is you learn to listen with your hands. So you're listening from this other perspective, this other space, this more embodied space, this intuitive space. So you really get a sense of where do my hands want to go, where do they instinctively feel that they need to go? A lot of times we're already instinctively healing ourselves. I mean, we're just born healers, even if we don't see ourselves that way.

Speaker 2:

We place our hands wherever we're in pain, especially with a child. They, you know, they trip, they cut their knee. We're going to kiss the boo-boo. We're going to put our hands over the boo-boo. We're going to help to heal it. Naturally, mothers do this. So that's Reiki. But when you have these attunements and you learn these symbols and mantras and certain hand placements, we're just fine tuning it.

Speaker 4:

So could anybody administer Reiki? I'm thinking, obviously, yes, mastery, that goes with learning this energy modality, this energy healing modality, and obviously you've studied it, you have been certified, you run certification programs. But for the lay person, who's just kind of becoming aware of this or hearing of it for the first time, what's a simple practice that they might do, even at home, to self-administer Reiki?

Speaker 2:

on your heart space, just like you just did, I think instinctively. You went there and that feels really good. One of the places that I instinctively have gone for years not so much recently, but was to place my hands over my neck, over my throat chakra just one hand on either side, very gently, like a scarf when I'm laying on my side at night, very gently like a scarf when I'm laying on my side at night. That is a way for me to recharge, rejuvenate, have it be safe to speak my truth. That has been really powerful for me and, honestly, wherever you instinctively want to place your hands, just try placing them there.

Speaker 2:

I was on a podcast the other day and the woman interviewing me placed her hands on her forehead because she was having a little bit of a headache and she started to feel tingling. She started to feel heat. So the heat is a byproduct of your cells opening up, recognizing that life force, energy, that love energy, and drawing in. The recipient is the one in charge of how much they receive and then the body is in charge of where it goes. So when you take an Advil, you don't tell the Advil where you're in pain. There's an intelligence that works with your body. This is very similar. There's an intelligence that works with your body. This is very similar. There's an intelligence that your body has. How does the body know how to heal itself? It just does right. It has that intelligence, it has that wisdom. When you give it the right conditions, it heals really well.

Speaker 2:

We heal the most when we're sleeping because we're so relaxed. Ideally, when we fall into that deeper sleep, we're so relaxed that we heal the most. You see, like your eyebrow hairs grow overnight, right, like everything grows and heals overnight when we get that deeper sleep. So you could think of Reiki as like the deepest sleep possible. So when someone's on my Reiki table, for example, which is just a massage table, but when someone's on my Reiki table, for example, which is just a massage table, but when someone's on my Reiki table, they're fully closed and a lot of times they'll start snoring. They will go into a very deep meditation a lot of the time.

Speaker 2:

So over the years I've kind of seen everything. 26 plus years of doing Reiki, I've kind of seen everything. And what I see across the board is people feel blissful, they feel safe. Their nervous system gets to start to heal. So when we are in a space where we feel relaxed, we feel calm, we feel open. In a space where we feel relaxed, we feel calm, we feel open, we feel loving. Everything we want in our life naturally is just going to be attracted to us, and I know you talk about that a lot on the podcast too.

Speaker 4:

Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about my experience because, yeah, I'd love that. So a lot of you know that in the spring, late winter, early springtime I was out with Siri and a group of women all entrepreneurs and we met up in Mount Hood in Oregon and we had a retreat and everyone's working on different parts of their business and we really went there with the intention of, first of all, bonding, because we were all on a very similar journey and we all just really were excited about being able to collaborate more together and be there. And Siri did a beautiful job at really orchestrating some of these unique experiences that we had while we were together, and one of them was a breathwork session that she led that also had a Reiki component, and little did I know, first of all, definitely in a blissful space during our breathwork session, but little did I know that that combination of breath, work and Re happened and it was this enormous release of emotion. Nothing negative, nothing came up. That was like it was just this release and it was like the idea, not like it was a nervous system. Really, I thought we were all in this very relaxed state. Uh-uh, not until we went through that experience did we really get to a fully regulated nervous system state? But to do that it actually had to let go of a lot of stuff that we didn't all realize we were carrying. Yeah, it was tremendous.

Speaker 4:

And at one point Siri laid her hands on me. She went through each of the women there and in that moment, that tingling sensation that Siri talked about, the exchange of the warmth that went from her through me, it's one of those things that once you experience it, the recall is so visceral because they're very unique experience and it was just this idea of being. It's hard to explain other than say, wrapped in love. So you have the highly intelligent women that are building these businesses, that are doing all these things very successful, doing all these things very successful, and were really brought back into the state of regulation through something that quite frankly looks and probably is so simple but incredibly powerful. And that was what was so moving about. It is that nobody suspected what was going to transpire. I think we all were kind of looking around at each other, surprised at the emotional reactions we had to the experience. How was it for you as the facilitator?

Speaker 2:

It is one of the most rewarding experiences across the board for me of my life. I was a professional, successful actor most of my life and there's a lot of highs. You get to travel, you get to work with famous people. Sometimes this is just as good, if not better, for me the high that I get from being of service with my gifts and we all. Because you were asking like, well, can anyone do this? Can the lay person do this? Yes, yes, anything that I do, you can do too, and I teach you how to do it. And please come and learn, because it will empower you. And that is my favorite thing to do is empowering people, but specifically women, to come back to their power, to come back to their truth, to come back to their knowing, to come back to their mastery, their mastership, because we've all mastered energies and lessons and it's just a remembrance, it's just a decision yeah, it's a shift.

Speaker 4:

Right, there's a literal shift because I think so many of us are walking through life kind of clenched, yeah, holding our plates. We're spinning in the air because we have so much going on.

Speaker 2:

Personally, professionally and just there's If you're a mom. It's just like how do you not be dysregulated?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I get a lot of folks that say, yeah, but you're talking about CEOs. You are all CEOs of your life, whether you run a business or you're head of your household. Wherever you find yourself, in, whatever stage of life, you are the CEO of your life. And I'm going to bet dollars for donuts. A lot of you are just holding on to the stress of everyday living, and what is so beautiful about this experience is that and we're going to talk about breath work too here in a minute is that this whole movement of energy healing is really about returning to yourself, remembering who you were before the world told you who you were supposed to be right.

Speaker 2:

Exactly Coming back to the soul that you are Yep, exactly One breath at a time, one breath at a time.

Speaker 4:

Well, so that's a great segue. Let's talk breath work. So we just did a little bit of a dissection on Reiki. Let's talk breathwork. So we just did a little bit of a dissection on Reiki. Let's talk breathwork. Yeah, how did that come into being? How did you discover it? What exactly is it and, god Almighty, why are we all holding our breath all the time?

Speaker 2:

So it's interesting because with Reiki, it was rediscovered by a Japanese reformist monk in the late 1900s. And this was the answer to how did Jesus and Buddha heal? What was the formula for healing With breathwork? Oh my gosh, I mean, the beginning of time is when breathwork started, right?

Speaker 4:

God, we're all in this existence. Let's go back to Genesis.

Speaker 2:

What is life? Life is breath. This is how we come in. This is the last thing we do before we go out. We're all doing breath work. We're just not necessarily doing conscious, connected breath work right. We're all breathing. Hopefully, if you're listening to this, you're breathing.

Speaker 2:

So the type of breath work that I do is just a triactive breath. I don't actually do lots of different variations of breathwork. Maybe one day I will, but for now, for the past 20 years, I've tried various types of breathwork and I've landed on this triactive breath, which I find to be the most powerful and the most beautiful and the most exciting and cathartic and the most healing, and I just feel my most expansive, most expressed self, my most relaxed, dropped in authentic self. So the tractive breath is all in and out of the mouth, just the mouth, which is what you and I did at the retreat. And what is so surprising is that something so simple that we do every day, all day long that if we just put a little bit of consciousness into it and a little bit of direction into it and a little bit of discipline into it because there's work in breathwork we're not just meditating, it's an active meditation and it's activating. So that is why and how little trauma big trauma in the body gets collected up and sometimes we get what's called tetany, which is like a little tightness or tingling sensations around the mouth or in that lobster claw hands or in the feet or sometimes all over the entire body can feel so incredible, but it's so beautiful because, as we know, the body keeps the score. Or maybe we don't know this, but this is what we're all learning in our self-improvement world is that the body keeps the score. So, regardless of what you're conscious of or unconscious of, our issues are in our tissues, our issues are in the soma. So the somatic release, the somatic support, the activation of the breath that we activate all of our systems. It brings up within us anything that's stuck or stored, without having to know how or why.

Speaker 2:

So I love therapy. I did therapy most of my life, but this is like 10 years of therapy is what you just described. It's like 10 years of therapy in one session. And it's because we're dealing not just with the mind, not just with the stories, but we're dealing with the whole body. And so if something, when something gets locked in between age zero and seven, when we're like fully just bunches, like we don't even know who we are and we're just taking it all on when it gets locked in in there, and then it becomes a part of our identity.

Speaker 2:

When we do breath work, we start to give the body enough safety in the nervous system to unravel that story and maybe we get to see the story. We get to see the movie, an epic movie of our life play out in front of us. We get to see while we're doing breathwork. A lot of the time there's the opportunity to see pieces sort of like a life review, if you will, pieces of our lives that are unhealed. And we get this zoomed out perspective because we're in this other state. We're not coming from ego, we're not coming from mind, we're not coming from fear, we're in this other safe place. And that really is a combination of the facilitator, creating the safe conditions and being the guide so that you feel that safety as well as you, because you're your highest authority in anything that you do.

Speaker 2:

And that's what I remind people of, of you saying and signaling to yourself I'm doing this, I'm showing up for myself, I'm going to do this breathwork, I'm going to breathe, I'm going to see what happens, I'm going to get on the ride, knowing full well that at any point, in any time, you can get off the ride, you can put yourself in the brakes or you can go into the gas.

Speaker 2:

But what you're talking about, michelle, is what we do as humans, and we all do it is gas break, gas break, gas break. And this allows the gas to be on so you can let it all go and set it all down. And I know I'm talking a lot in feeling terms, because this is my world, is just the experiential world as opposed to the science world. I'm sure there's other people that can talk to you more about the science of breathwork, but what I will say is most everything I do is the art of the invisible, so it's the experience. What does it feel like to eat a chocolate cake? What does it feel like to have an orgasm? What does it feel like to do anything that you can't quite explain? And that's my world, if you want a mystical, magical experience.

Speaker 2:

This is what I'm offering.

Speaker 4:

Let's talk about breathwork in terms of like. So many of us grew up right just in simple terms, knowing that it's important to breathe through your nose and out your mouth, and in breath work, you actually consciously breathe in through your mouth. So talk a little bit about what happens and why we're doing it that way. What is it that's activating? Because we talk about it as a somatic expression or somatic healing, and I don't know that a lot of people understand what that means when we say breathwork is a somatic healing. So let's break it down a little bit for us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so when I first started learning breathwork about 20 years ago, it was either this was a rebirthing practice, is what they would call it or aka conscious connected breath, and that was you could either breathe in and out of your nose or in and out of your mouth, and you just choose one or the other, so they both work.

Speaker 2:

Wim Hof, who's sort of like one of the fathers of breath work. What he says, which I love, is he just says just get the breath in, it doesn't actually matter. We get in our head about the technicalities of it and honestly, yes, it's 80% belly and 20% chest soft exhale, and there's a whole explanation I go through before we do a breathwork class. But what it is is that you're just saying I'm going to oxygenate my system, I'm going to overload the system with oxygen, so it's going to have a reaction within my body that's going to start to release, and then, when you combine that with the Reiki, it's the loving energy. There's just this magic formula that happens where you, just your body just starts to feel like it can release. I don't know how else to say it really, other than just have the experience.

Speaker 4:

Well, I think about it, as you're getting so much more oxygen than you normally would when you're just moving through your day and we forget to breathe. How many of us are on a call, receiving information and we're somewhat holding our breath, listening intently, and we exhale at the end, but we're literally holding our breath for 10, 15 minutes holding our breath.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So what I will say about shallow breathing, which is what we tend to naturally do, is that's an unconscious breath and it's actually signaling to the body that you're not safe. So you actually don't have an expansive viewpoint of anything. You're in a fight or flight response, you're in a state of dysregulation. So when we signal to the body this activation, we get into the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. We do both of these responses in the breath work. We're doing this in a safe way. We're activating everything in a safe way. So it's like trying to think of, like if you had some baking soda at the bottom of a glass and you stirred it up. It's all in there. But what we're doing is with breathwork is we're activating it. We're stirring it up so it can come up and out, so you can clear it. I love it.

Speaker 4:

All right, let's talk about, let's move on to Akashic Record. What exactly is it? How does it work? What are we doing in this process? Tell us more.

Speaker 2:

So Akashic Record reading is something that I was exposed to accidentally and I think a lot of people have had moments or blips of this. So I was doing Reiki, as you know, for years and years and years and occasionally I would tap into some wisdom and I didn't have any sort of control or predictability around this wisdom. People always on my table would want to know after their Reiki session not always, but sometimes they would want to know after a Reiki session. Tell me more about myself. And I was like, well, that's not really the point of Reiki. The point of Reiki is really to get out of our heads same with breathwork to stay in the body, to be in a state of peace. I don't analyze, I don't diagnose with Reiki, but with Akashic. This is a call to be able to answer questions that are on the heart, that are on the mind. So literally anything that keeps you up at night, the thing that's never getting better, I like to say, is a really good prompt. What's the thing that's never getting better? What's the thing that keeps you up at night? What's the thing that's breaking your heart? What's the thing that keeps you up at night? What's the thing that's breaking your heart? What's the thing that you just can't quite figure out? What Akashic record readings can do, whether you're doing it for yourself and Thane with Rake, you can learn to do it for yourself first and then you can learn to read other people is. It gives us access to a perspective. You can imagine yourself in an airplane looking down. It gives you this zoomed out perspective of your life, of your soul. It gives you the soul level truth of the situation. So, as opposed to that strategizing mind or that coming from that fear space, it gives us a perspective that oftentimes is very much in alignment with our common sense and our intuition and there's an overlap, but oftentimes it can be a perspective that we never would have understood or seen until we're like 10 years out or maybe ever. But what it is is it's a perspective that is offered to you through your team on the other side. So masters, teachers, loved ones the other side helping you to access this very same with Reiki loving, unconditionally, loving energy perspective. So imagine the most loving, caring parent that loved you unconditionally. That's what these but that don't have any sort of their own human block or obstacles, that they're viewing you through. This is like a God energy, if you will. This is an unconditionally loving perspective that you can tap into and access through asking questions.

Speaker 2:

So there is a prayer. There's always, with everything I teach, there's a grounding and running our energy. That's the foundation for literally everything I teach. But this is literally. What you were talking about before is it's all from the heart. It's all like we see the truth from the heart, we see the furthest from the heart. So this is really a pathway prayer to access the heart, and then again intention, and so anyone, any lay person, can learn to open their Akashic records. It used to be for special people and now it's really become same with Reiki, A lot of these things. It was like special people and now actually, no, we can all. We can all do this.

Speaker 2:

When you say special people, you mean people who have more like attuned A monk, a high priest, okay, Someone who's like, oh yeah, we go through them to get our wisdom, but now we're really taking out the middleman, and now it's really a time we've shifted into a time, a paradigm shift, into a time of we have the power, we have the access, and it's not it's not a ego space, it's a. If you're coming from pure intention, if you're coming from the heart, and if you're using these structures, these practices, and if you're using these structures, these practices, you're trained by someone who knows how to teach you, then yes, yeah, you can totally do this. It's pretty wild, and a lot of times people perceive in various ways. There's a lot of different ways that we perceive, and so what I teach people is how do you perceive? And I teach you the distinction between what is your intuition and what is the Akashic realm.

Speaker 2:

Now here's the other aspect of the Akashic is that, just like we were talking about with Reiki, the energy that everything's made up of, anything that is alive, has an energy field, has a plasma, so there's like a thin plasma, and that plasma surrounding everything is recording at all times, just like we're recording right now. That plasma is recording and so it knows there's a wisdom. It understands everything In the Akashic. There's no time, there's no past, there's no future. It's just all here, all now. We're just.

Speaker 4:

It's everything's happening right now, but I love that I'd like to stay here for a while get a few things done and then return Well, but you can tap into this plasma of information. Okay, yes, let's talk about what it looks like. How do you do an Akashic recording? How do you actually do one?

Speaker 2:

An Akashic record reading.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, an Akashic record reading.

Speaker 2:

I don't love just for the record, pun intended. I don't love the name record reading, because I think it conjures up images of a file system or a library. People think it is, they associate it with it, but really there's no actual technical library of information. It's just one way to kind of understand from our human perspective. But what it looks like from the outside is just two people having a conversation. So think of like a therapy session, but from a spiritual perspective. So I liken it to like spiritual therapy.

Speaker 4:

Oh, I like that and I love this idea of you're tapping into the guides from I don't know what the right wording here is, siri, so guide me on this one From the other side Pride right From the other realm, from that place before we are now here that I always call it like the nowhere right.

Speaker 2:

The invisible.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, dwayne Dyer used to talk about it At one point. You were not here, you were nowhere, and now you're now here. Oh, I love it.

Speaker 4:

Yes, Going back to the nowhere, and it's a matter of spacing. If you look at it nowhere prior to here. Now here it's spelled the exact same way. The only difference is spacing, and I was like that is a brilliant way to talk about the fact that we move through space. We transition through space throughout our journey because we all know that we're spiritual beings having a human experience. This just happens to be the human experience part that we're in right now, but there'll be a time when we're no longer here, we're in the nowhere again, and whatever you call that next realm, and we know from science that energy cannot be destroyed.

Speaker 1:

Oh, what are?

Speaker 2:

we, we're just energy, we're always energy. It's never destroyed, it just becomes energy again.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, we transition to a different form, exactly. So, okay, first of all, how did you get into that first? How did you learn this, and was there a defining moment for you? Yeah, said, oh. I don't want to just experience that, I want to be able to actually conduct Akashic record readings for others.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I was accidentally tapping into it when I was doing Reiki, which I later learned while I was teaching a Reiki class. Oh, one of the symbols that you teach in the second degree Reiki. The third symbol is the access point to the Akashic realm. I didn't know that for years and then I was like, oh, connecting the dots, so I was accidentally accessing it.

Speaker 2:

But a friend of mine who's an Akashic teacher that learned from like the mother, if you will, of the Akashic who really brought it to the forefront Dr Linda Howe, who I interviewed on my podcast. She is one of her top students. This woman, helen Bonderheid, who I've also interviewed and she's lovely. She was starting to do a Pashak record readings on me while I was giving her Reiki readings. We traded back and forth. I thought, oh, that's so interesting what she's doing, let's try it, I'll try it and I just loved it. It was like, ooh, it's better than a psychic reading, because it's not.

Speaker 2:

Psychic. Readings often come from a fear space and are sort of predictory, and predictions aren't always true because we have a million access points to our future based on every decision that we're making in this very moment. Right, so it's all free will. So, as opposed to a psychic reading, which is fun, this is like even better. This is like, oh, wow, what are all the possibilities that are here laid out in front of me? I loved it and I knew and I'm sure you've had these moments, michelle, where you just like know, when you're experiencing something, that you're going to teach it.

Speaker 2:

You start learning from someone and you're like I'm going to be teaching this, you just going to teach it. You start learning from someone and you're like I'm going to be teaching this. You just kind of feel it. I knew, as soon as I started doing these trades with her and I was getting these Akashic record reading sessions with her, I was like I'm going to teach this, so I can just tell. And then I did. I took courses from her and trained and practiced, and practiced and practiced. I do like seven Akashic record readings a day. I mean, once I love something I'm like right, I'm in it all the way. And so for like eight and a half years now, I've been giving readings and people have the most incredible, incredible experiences and I get to see them be relieved of these lower vibrations we're going to do one of these you and I, we're going to havea it's pretty fun.

Speaker 4:

And then I will report back to everyone, because while I've experienced Reiki and I've experienced breathwork in many different forms of you know through different teachers, I've done it in Akashic record reading. So I'm very curious to learn more and experience it firsthand so I can talk more about it.

Speaker 2:

The other thing that's really cool, michelle, I'll just tell you, is, once you've done one, that's not like for life. You get to come back and do more, with anyone you want to, obviously, and update your Akashic records. So literally everything forward and backwards gets to be updated vibrationally after you're reading. There's like a up level.

Speaker 4:

What's one of the insights that you learned from? I'm assuming that, because you're a teacher of Akashic, well you're an actual practitioner of Akashic record reading that you also get your Akashic record reading done for yourself periodically. What's maybe an insight that you've gleaned from one of yours that has shaped your path that you can share with us so that people have a better understanding of the tangible insights that are gleaned from these experiences?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I actually. It's interesting. I actually don't have an Akashic record reading practitioner that I go to. Okay, because I can access it for myself. You can do it for yourself, okay, I love that. That's the first thing you learn. So, but when I'm teaching Akashic record reading, that is when I learn the most, and so one of the most profound experiences that I've led people through and I've led myself through, and also when I was learning, there's a couple things. One, when I was learning Akashic record reading for the first time, a profound experience was seeing a past life, and it was very humbling and what you get to see is the other side of. We all, pretty much as souls, get to see both sides of all situations, so we might be really poor in one life and then we're rich in the next. For example, I got to see a situation where I was not a good person in a past life, and that was very interesting, gave me a lot of perspective.

Speaker 4:

Hard to imagine knowing who you are and how you show up in this realm, uh well, thank you for that.

Speaker 2:

You know we're, yeah, we all get to learn and and, so that was profound. And then the so many profound experiences. But the other profound thing that I've taken from Akashic record reading is I really like bringing people through. This might sound a little spooky, but an end-of-life experience. So you actually I walk you very gently, very safely, very softly through a beautiful, positive end-of-life experience while you're in your akashic, with your akashic records open when I'm teaching, and I think that is so profound because it's just so healing to have that perspective on our life from that vantage point and to viscerally feel all guides.

Speaker 4:

I think that that's such a a profound way to see it because we so often are so black and white in the way we experience our reality and our you know again, I say that with quotes around our reality, of our perception of what is real for us in any given moment. That just sounds transformative. But okay, let's talk to the skeptics out there who might be like this feels very esoteric all of the maybe the three different modalities that we've been talking about, yeah, of maybe the three different modalities that we've been talking about. Just a little more esoteric, how would you help to demystify it for them and talk about how it could maybe help somebody who's at the crossroads of?

Speaker 2:

Well, this is what I want to say about skepticism. I want to say, first of all, it's so healthy, I encourage it. Please be skeptical, because otherwise we're in trouble. I think it's great. I think it's great to ask questions, I think it's great to be curious.

Speaker 2:

You do not have to be a quotes believer in any of these things in Reiki and breathwork and Akashic record reading to enjoy the benefit of any of them. You certainly don't have to believe in Reiki to feel the feelings, the benefits. What is required is a curiosity and a little enough of an open mind to say let me try this Like, let me try a new food for the first time. I'm going to try oysters for the first time. I mean just the curiosity what does this taste like? That's all that's required.

Speaker 2:

I don't think you can figure out any of these things I'm talking about with reading a book, or yes, books are wonderful and I love them and they're helpful, but at the end of the day, they're all experiential. So enough of a curiosity, enough of a crack of an open mind to say let me see what this could feel like. And what I will say is the more open that we are to experiences, the more possibility. We invite in to have a new experience. So, yes, it is energetically expensive to have a new experience and also those are the most life-changing things. That we can do is to open ourselves up to the rewiring.

Speaker 4:

But hold on, let's not go too far, because I want to just break down what you just said. Yes, energetically expensive to have a new experience. What does that mean?

Speaker 2:

So we have our neural pathways that are set. We decide things, we categorize them in our mind. I'm sure you've talked about this a lot on the podcast. It's like our body does not want to expend more energy than it needs to. That's what I mean by expensive, right? So it is expensive to create a new neural pathway because it takes energy, it takes calories.

Speaker 4:

It takes calories To break out of the experience that we've been going through. Where we get? We talk about the routines of our lives, the experiences we've already been having to break out of. That is what you're talking about.

Speaker 2:

Okay, just to clarify to think a new thought, to have a new paradigm shift. To have a breakthrough, we need to be able to create a new neural pathway. We need to have a new experience. That can be scary and it can be quotes energetically expensive because it takes calories to do that. It takes a little bit of courage.

Speaker 4:

I think, though, we're talking in this particular audience, which is this wonderful, very curious, highly attuned group of people who may not be as fully versed on these, so this is a phenomenal fundamentals masterclass that you're giving us right now, but I do think they all hold such high regard for curiosity and learning that there's going to be just an interest to learn more and to experience more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think, I think you get to be surprised. Like you explained in the breathwork session that you had at the retreat, you were willing enough, you were courageous enough to show up for that Some. Some part of Michelle was ready.

Speaker 4:

Oh, 100 percent, I'll try anything.

Speaker 2:

And therefore you got to have this incredibly wild, visceral experience that you'll never be the same A hundred percent and I'm going to.

Speaker 4:

I'm going to talk a little bit. We had another friend, a mutual friend, that was in this and I think it's fair, it's important for us to talk about little bit that. We had another friend, a mutual friend, that was in this and I think it's fair it's important for us to talk about, like all different experiences. He was like I've done breathwork before, I don't want to do this again. Every time I do breathwork it's very emotional and she was just not having any of it, sure, and then she was the one that was probably the that moved the needle the most during that session. That's right, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, it's hard to compare experiences because everyone had such a dramatic experience.

Speaker 4:

Everyone had their own level of breakthrough. But yeah, we all kind of were like whoa, the person that was like not going to do it, I don't want to feel it.

Speaker 2:

I've gone through it before and we're all like okay, and we know that what's on the other side of any of that resistance is just a watershed experience.

Speaker 4:

It was amazing and it just brought everybody you know. So, for those of you listening, you had to imagine there were 10 of us listening. You had to imagine there were 10 of us. 12 of us were around there. So imagine a dozen women together and Siri is facilitating this group.

Speaker 4:

We're kind of in like a yoga studio-esque space, on mats, going through the breath work, a guided visualization, experiencing hands-on healing through Reiki that she was administering, and it was so life-giving that, the bond that you feel with people who were not entirely strangers to begin with, but most of us haven't spent time together in person, and so we were newly that time together in person, and so we were newly acquainted in person although we've all been in contact for a long time now, virtually through Zoom and video conference and what have you and it just brought us all together at a much deeper heart level of collaboration and ask me anything, I'll tell you about my experience a level of being able to be vulnerable and feel safe.

Speaker 4:

People told their life stories in ways that you can't even imagine, because when you walk in, everybody's so put together and everyone's very successful in their own right and you sort of then just check all of that kind of stuff at the door and you come in as your soul self into a space like this and you really are seeing past the external shell of each of these individual women, right straight to the soul. And it was such a beautiful experience. I think we all came away, and obviously Siri came away with great ideas, because now she's doing these phenomenal retreats now pretty regularly. Thank you, she's sparked a full movement, so kudos.

Speaker 2:

It was very encouraging and very inspiring. Having that breathwork session with you, michelle, was like a light bulb went off and I went. I can't be doing this on Zoom anymore. I got to do this in person now.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it was transformative. It really was All right. I want to talk a little bit about something that you say a lot. It's in a lot of your. You talk about it on the podcast, talk about it with your business, but you talk about helping people expand their capacity to feel good, and I wanted to focus in on that. I love that phrase, first of all, and why do you think that it's so hard for high performers, for high achievers, for entrepreneurs, for business leaders, to allow themselves to feel good? And what happened when they finally do?

Speaker 2:

I want to say as humans, I think it's hard, and that includes high performers, high achievers. I think as humans, regardless, it is challenging for us to allow ourselves to ride the roller coaster of life, to fully feel anything, because when I say feel good, I think that sounds like potentially, I'm saying let's just be happy all the time and feeling good now. For me, the definition of that includes the catharsis, it includes the crying, it includes the fear, it includes a fully alive life, a fully alive experience, a fully sensational experience. So expanding our capacity to feel is probably more accurate than to just feel good. But for me, it feels good to feel, to feel all of it, and that, even though a lot of us are so deathly scared to feel all of it, for very good reason, when we allow ourselves to feel all of it, those are the moments we do remember at the end of our life that flash before us are the heightened moment of I felt all the love, or I felt all the sorrow, I felt all the joy. Or I rode that literal roller coaster and I felt all the fear. I rode that literal roller coaster and I felt all the fear.

Speaker 2:

So the reason that we don't want to feel all of it is. It's a lot to process for our system, for our nervous system. Our mind, our ego is very scared because predictable is safe. So survival brain is like safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety. Well, what's safe? Safe is safe. So survival brain is like safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety. Well, what's safe? Safe is predictable. Feeling all of it is quite wild. It is not predictable, but that's what our soul truly wants.

Speaker 4:

And I have this conversation a lot with my coaching clients who are so hard on themselves because they're like well, I don't understand. Why wouldn't I want to expand? Why do I feel this inertia? Why do I feel this resistance? I have to remind them, first of all, it's not your fault Like we are forward wired at a brain level to regard safety as part of our survival, not to naturally want expansion into the unknown. That's overriding the system. You see, you've got to really think about it as you're stepping outside of the norm, when you take a leap of faith, when you start a new chapter, when you decide to do something new because it's a brave thing to do, not a why can't I do more of this and be hard on yourself about it? But you have to remind yourself we are just not hardwired as humans to behave that way innately, until we make these intentional, conscious choices to do so.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and if you think about every experience you've ever had that was either joyful or scary or heartbreaking, your system remembers that, your body remembers that and it is like never again, never again.

Speaker 4:

Me and every roller coaster that ever has been in my life. Never again, never again, never again.

Speaker 2:

And that is like the number one motivator of most of our lives. Yeah, is the never again. This is why people become billionaires is because never again will I feel so scared.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, the fear of not having, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Right. So I think that never again registers so deeply. I know it registers so deeply in our systems that, just like you said, it is not our fault. But expanding our capacity to feel good is a body job. It's a subconscious and unconscious job and that is we've got to address from the body, from the root, from the source. And we've also hopefully, if you're ready and willing, addressing soul, addressing spirit, giving ourselves that zoomed out perspective from the soul level, so that we're not stuck in Groundhog Day, because that obviously is what we're going to get if we're just in our survival brain, in our survival body.

Speaker 4:

And we are not here just to survive. We are here to thrive and have multiple different experiences. Know, the idea of going back to full self-expression, full ability to feel all the different things that humans are able to feel and to live on that level is so different and so unique and, quite frankly, it's why we do the work we do to really help people to fully come alive. There are too many people walking around on autopilot. We don't need more of that. We need more people fully embodying who they are and what they came here to do, and so, through the activation of some of these energy healing modalities, through coaching, through a variety of different tools that you have available to you, this is really about getting to that next level of fully living.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and what I'll say just to wrap up is it's really hard to make these changes in our daily lives, because everything around us and inside of us reminds us of the same old, same old. And so when we step out, like you did for our Goddess of Light retreat, and when people step out and they do something different outside of their natural, normal environment, that is the opportunity to rewire those systems, to create a new neural pathway. That then is now there. So the nervous system builds on itself. So you don't have to go back to zero Now. You've gone to 20. You can build from there.

Speaker 2:

So, I think it's so important for us to step out of our daily lives and have these retreat experiences, so I'm just incredibly honored and excited that you brought me on to talk about all of these quotes, woo modalities and to just give people kind of a baseline of curiosity.

Speaker 4:

It's important to say look, I come from 25 years of hard news business. I was in the business world for a really long time before I took the leap into entrepreneurism, and energy healing was a fairly new thing for me up until about five years ago and then, since then, it's been like high charged and high activated, as the more we learn about how we are all energy, well, then you dive into it because you're like well, look, this is the life force of all things. Let's learn more and let's do more. So I would say I walked into that retreat experience knowing that I had no idea what was going to go down. I was part of it and I knew I was going to be helping to facilitate parts of it, but also as purely another woman looking to connect with community, stepping out of my norm, which is more coaching and traditional coaching, into this other realm of going.

Speaker 4:

Okay, I'm curious, what can we do together and what am I willing to allow myself to experience? And I think it's so important to do that, to kind of push the envelope, because then you realize, oh, it wasn't actually so different, as it was inviting and welcoming and a remembering and much more familiar than I expected it to be, and I think that's really important for people I know there are a lot of you out there who are business leaders and are coming from the corporate world or newly transitioned into the entrepreneurial space and don't have as much exposure to this as we do and certainly as Siri does to just get curious, because it's in that curiosity that the magic happen. I loved every minute of it. I can't wait to go do another one. What I would love for you to do, siri, before we wrap, is tell people where they can find you, and then also I want you to tell them a little bit about what you have coming up.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, siri at sageandblushwellnesscom, or sageandblushwellnesscom, siri Berg Thornton, on any socials. What I've got coming up is a first and second degree Reiki certification retreat at my home, july 21st to the 23rd. I've never done this before. After 26 years, I am combining for the first time ever, first and second degree Reiki certification into one immersive retreat experience. It's going to be incredible. It's going to be fully catered, so nourishing. There's some incredible souls that are coming. I have two spots left and they're probably going to go soon, so literally like the doors are closing, maybe by the time you've heard this, but please reach out to me and I'll let you know. Beyond that, I have about four retreat coming up, so this has become like the full passion is getting in person with people to have these deep transformations. There's nothing like being in person in sisterhood.

Speaker 4:

That's just the best.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, you can. You can get in touch with me and I'll tell you what the opportunities are and all of them are. I've partnered with this woman, marnay of Bastion, which is this incredible restaurant in Portland Oregon, and so we're doing these retreats together. So she does like organic, vegetarian, gluten-free, incredible food. So you'll be fully nourished body, mind, soul.

Speaker 4:

I love it All right. Well, we'll definitely have the links to all of that in the show notes, so please check it out. Go find Siri and do not forget she also has a podcast, the Authentic Creative. You can find it on Apple Spotify anywhere you get your podcast. But thank you again, siri. It's always a pleasure to be with you. I just really appreciate you taking us down this road of energy healing and talking us through these modalities and explaining really what they are and how they can help us and improve our lives in so many different ways for people who may not be as familiar with them. So thank you again for your time for your energy.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Michelle.

Speaker 4:

I really just adore you. I adore you and I'm excited about all the things you're doing and I cannot wait to see what's next. Thank you so much. Okay, everyone, until next time, go and live your extraordinary life time.

Speaker 3:

Go and live your extraordinary life. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please take a moment to rate and review. If you have recommendations for future topics, please reach out to me at michelleriosofficialcom. Lastly, please consider supporting this podcast by sharing it. Together, we can reach inspire. Thank you.

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Michelle Rios

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